Pages

Monday, October 1, 2012

After all That, I can Still be Shocked. That's Shocking

So this is what it’s come to.

After
four years of invective, four years during which the right has called
President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action
case, a terrorist-sympathizer, and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have
been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s
mother a whore.

I'll get right to it: After reading Goldberg's piece, my stomach is churning; it's telling me if I
don't stop thinking about this, I may just vomit. I'll admit when it
comes to the really ugly stuff, if there's any chance I can avoid it I
will. I'm chicken that way. But I can't ignore this,
because the last thing I want is for vicious lies borne of pure hate to become trivial or normal. We're dangerously close to that point already.

There's nothing trivial or normal about mailing out millions (that's millions) of copies of "Dreams from my Father", an artlessly fabricated anti-Obama movie by a producer/director named Joel Gilbert. The movie is narrated by an actor playing Barack Obama and depicts his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as a loose slut who lied about who Obama's father really was. (According to the film, he wasn't a Kenyan, but an American poet and black activist named Frank Marshall Davis, who had ties to Communist/Socialist movements in Chicago and Hawaii, and whose genes the Communist/Socialist Obama apparently inherited.)

In the film, Obama's grandfather is supposed to have used his job as furniture salesman as a front for nefarious CIA duties. Nude pictures, purportedly of Obama's mother (purportedly taken by Davis, who purportedly had a history of sending out nude pictures of women), grace the screen for long, lascivious seconds. It leaves no scum-covered boulder unturned.

If this were just some juvenile video, it might not be worth noting, but, as Goldberg says:

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy
video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad
taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert
claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father
have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000
to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re
putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million]
or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

While Goldberg admits she can't verify those numbers, she's finding evidence of some active distribution:

But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail.
Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was
shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican
National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in
Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech, saying, “I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

In this year's campaign, the Republicans have found themselves with nothing to work with. They boxed themselves into a corner by going along with Mitch McConnell's promise to do whatever it takes to keep Obama from earning a second term. Any good they might have done for the people they'd hurt over the previous eight years would have required Obama's signature as the final step. It would have looked like they were working for him. Or at least with him. They couldn't do it. So they did nothing,

So when this kind of thing happens they don't take steps to denounce it. If anything, they encourage it. It builds their case without their having to do a thing.

When Goldberg says, "They are calling Obama's mother a whore," unfortunately she isn't just talking about Gilbert's movie. In this piece she talks also about Dinesh D'Souza's equally odious and deceitful book, Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream. (The follow-up to last year's whopper, The Roots of Obama's Rage and companion to his widely panned movie, 2016, Obama's America.)

The right wing loves D'Souza's seeming intellectual offerings, happily overlooking how riddled they are with provable lies:

Obama is not merely the presiding instrument of American decline, he
is the architect of American decline. He wants America to be downsized.
He wants Americans to consume less, and he would like to see our
standard of living decline relative to that of other nations. He seeks a
diminished footprint for America in the world. He detests America's
traditional allies, like Britain and Israel, and seeks to weaken them;
he is not very worried about radical Muslims acquiring a nuclear bomb or
coming to power in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. He is quite
willing to saddle future dollars toward this end and if he had been
permitted, he would have spent trillions more. He has shown no
inclination, and has no desire, to protect America's position as number
one in the world; he would be content to see America as number 18, or
number 67, just another country seated at the great dining table of
nations.

When Mitt Romney was caught saying what he said about the 47% who make up Obama voters--that all 47% of us are lazy moochers who just want government handouts, so who needs us, anyway?--I thought that would be the end of it for Mitt. It wasn't.

When Mitt assured 60 Minute's Scott Pelley that every American already has health care--it's called Their Nearest Emergency Room--and when Joe Scarborough dissolved into infantile blubbering on set after watching the clip the next morning, I thought maybe this was it; Mitt was cooked. He wasn't. Not completely, anyway.

Even earlier, when Mitt chose as his running mate, Paul Ryan, a slavishly anti-social program guy even during what everybody agrees is a relentlessly tenacious depression/recession, it should have been a call to quit these guys. It wasn't.

Plain old citizen Grover Norquist's success at exacting a mandatory anti-tax pledge from every Republican politician should have sent shuddery danger signals to the voting public. It didn't.

Paul Ryan's OldTestamenty attacks on women, condemning both birth control and abortion, should have eliminated him from any chance at the vice presidency. It didn't.

With the rise of ALEC and the revelations of the Koch brothers' relentless support and financing of anti-government members of congress, along with anti-democratic governors, red flags should have been waving frantically. So far only half the country is seeing them.

With all that, I thought I might be shock-proof by now. Turns out I'm not.

Followers

Join our discussions on Facebook

Come on over!

Tweet, tweet

Solidarity Michigan

Internet Rumors Debunked

FactCheck.org

Thanks to the Labor Movement

From Political Loud Mouth

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal."

-John Kennedy

Any Other Questions??

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Written by Lawrence O'Donnell and spoken by Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos on The West Wing

About the Photographs:

Many of the photographs, unless clearly historic or news-related, are the property of Ramona's Voices. It's only polite to provide a link back to this site when using them. Letting me know you've used one would be good, too.